Suppose, for a moment, you could let go of all old memories of past mistakes, failures, losses, judgments and reaction patterns that have shaped your life up to now? If, for one moment, you could be free of all fear, anger, hurt, hate, doubt and suspicion, what kind of energy would you want to send out into the world? When I ask myself this question the answer always comes back, love.

One early morning in late 1985, while driving an empty mini-bus over Mt. St. Helena in Calistoga, California, I had a life-changing experience (Encounter With the Energy of Unconditional Love) that showed me what it feels like and what it means to be loved unconditionally. It was an emotional ride like no other. Following are several excerpts from that lengthy experience:

“This is the energy of unconditional love,” says a deep, soothing male voice that seems to come from every point within the energy field at once.

Wow, I sob even harder now, because I know it’s true! That’s why I keep bursting into tears every time I touch this Energy. Intuitively, I must have known all along what it was but, intellectually, I didn’t have a clue until now. What I do next completely astounds me but seems only natural under the circumstances – I open up. I utterly and spontaneously open my life and being to this loving Energy. And just as quickly as I open up, I begin to shut down because it suddenly occurs to me that every thought, feeling, and act I’ve ever committed in life is now completely exposed to view, the bad ones as well as the good ones. Feelings of vulnerability and shame begin to fill my mind.

Sensing my growing anxiety, the all-present Voice calmly reassures me by saying: “Nothing you can ever say or do can keep you from being loved unconditionally.”

At once stunned and relieved by the unconditional acceptance behind these words, I cry even harder. I’ve never experienced this kind of love before, at least not in human terms! As I experience it now, I know there’s nothing I have to do to earn it. Just being is enough. Here, unlike the human world, there are no demands, no expectations, and no pre-conditions to satisfy before I receive love. It’s simply here to experience, remind and enjoy.

Literally bathing in this loving energy, I wonder if the anger, misperceptions, and imagined sins of my past will wash away forever. I use this moment to imagine they will, if not forever, at least for now. Even if it’s just the beginning of the end for these negative thoughts and feelings, that’s good enough for me.

As my own love begins to flow, I find myself joyfully wanting to perform miracles for this Loving Energy, to honor it for the loving regard in which it holds me. A superman in this alternate reality, I perform feats of magic and strength that are impossible to perform in the physical world. Then I stop to think about how important it is for me to fulfill my own unique potential as a human being here on earth. Suddenly, I know that the Energy of Unconditional Love is home, my real home! It is my place of birth or point of origin as a living soul. As I remember this, I also remember that the Energy of Unconditional Love is more than just a “place” – it is a state of mind and being I can create and experience wherever I am, no matter what I am doing!

When I can love enough to forgive and forget past mistakes and transgressions committed by me and against me, when I can see the world through other people’s eyes and realize that life is just as challenging for them as it is for me, my heart softens and love begins to flow. In that moment, I’m able to forgive us all for our trespasses and remember that what we do now and in the future is far more important than worrying about what we have done in the past.

Yes, forgiveness is the Big Kahuna I want to master! When I allow myself to forgive myself and others, I feel my spirit move. It’s a rare feeling, which tells me how much I’ve bought into the Old Testament, vengeance is mine philosophy of right and wrong, good and bad, guilt and punishment. Old Testament thinking is huge in our world and it is so self-destructive. Other than aging, it is the primary source of suffering, illness, injury and death in the world.

Forgiveness and Appreciation – Until we learn how to forgive, we cannot let go and move on. Until we stop treating ourselves like children, we cannot grow past childhood’s end. Until we can see how amazing life is, we cannot appreciate it for the magic and wonder that it is. Until we can do these things, we’ll be stuck in a time warp, doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again with little more than cosmetic change. Even though we are clever enough to build cars, airplanes and computers, we are still barbarians at heart until we learn how to forgive and move on. Isn’t it time we stop being the hapless victims of reality and become the conscious creators of it?

Is it hard to forget our old ways? Is it hard to forgive ourselves for past transgressions? Is it hard to take full responsibility for our lives and begin to think for ourselves? Yes, there is nothing harder! But, is it worth it? Yes! The more we practice forgiveness, the more we let it permeate us mind, body and soul, the more love will emerge to fill our lives. Forgiveness is the key to salvation and redemption. And once we actually forgive ourselves, we realize there was nothing to forgive in the first place. When we’re doing the best we can, what more can we ask of ourselves? But there’s always more to know isn’t there? And once we know more, there is no excuse not to change.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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James Howard Kunstler | June 30, 2008 This isn’t so funny anymore. Intimations of a July banking collapse rumbled though the Internet this weekend while mainstream news orgs like The New York Times and CNN pulled their puds over swift boats and Amy Winehouse’s performance technique. Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones…? to quote the master.

What’s happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we’re gripped by inflation or deflation. It’s certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.

We’re a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.

We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s for reasons that are still debated today. My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked “money” into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets, meaning that every American who had wanted to buy a car or an electric toaster had done so and there was no one left to sell to. (The first round of globalism — 1870 – 1914 — had shut down after the fiasco of World War One.)

Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them. By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth has passed through an event horizon out of the known universe into some other realm of space-time, never to be seen again in this realm. This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation — money defaulted out-of-existence.

This condition is partly disguised by both the loss of credibility of US currency and real-world scarcities of oil and food, but the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.

The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere “liquidity” (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency (no cash either on hand or in the vault and nothing else to sell to raise cash except worthless “creative” securities that nobody would ever buy). But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.

Complicating matters is a global oil predicament that is really not hard to understand, but which the organs of news and opinion have obdurately failed to explicate for an anxious public. Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I’ve called this situation The Long Emergency.

Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I’ve tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with “solutions” to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life — mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape — but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the “environmental” elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.

So where we are at now is the equivalent of standing in the slop by the ocean shore under a gathering hundred-foot-high wave that is about to come crashing down on our heads. Since I sure don’t know everything, I can’t say how this will all play out in the months ahead, especially with the presidential election coming at the exact moment that voters will be turning on their furnaces for the cold and dark winter beyond. I would venture to say that so far our society as a whole has done a piss-poor job of comprehending the situation. But there is still the possibility, with four months of politicking left, that the nature of our predicament can be articulated in a way that few can fail to understand, the way Mr, Lincoln articulated the terms of the Civil War on the eve of its fateful outbreak. ————- James Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.

His latest nonfiction book, The Long Emergency describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.

P.S. I have tried both MySpace and Facebook, and in my humble opinion, both of them really suck. Facebook is not offensive, but you have to already know people in order to contact them on Facebook, so what is the point? (Actually, I put my wife’s profile on it, and she didn’t know anyone there, so it seems a waste.) I find MySpace offensive, and really makes me worry about the future of the Internet and our youth. (I saw an episode of the People’s Court yesterday, where predictably, the former couple or whatever they were had met on MySpace.) You can meet people there, but in order to get much attention, one needs to be a potty-mouthed jerk, basically, or a celebrity. At least it seems that way to me. I am still on MySpace, though. I keep thinking that things will get better there. Meanwhile, MySpace assaults me with all sorts of sexually oriented material while my beautiful wife sits about 5 feet away as she is now. MySpace basically seems like a human “meat market” and training ground for juvenile delinquents. In fact, one of my nephews got into a dispute with someone on MySpace, assaulted him with a stick, got arrested and put in jail for awhile. That was about a year ago. Fortunately, he is out of jail now. When I first put my profile on MySpace, I thought I would try to contact him and offer him some guidance. Apparently, he was not supposed to be on MySpace anymore, so a couple days later, his profile was no longer there. I guess that is for the better. I had some posts on my blog about the problems I see with the way the Internet is being used by many people and the lack of oversight of the Internet, which I also put on MySpace, making me even less popular there than before. But darn it, I have this honesty thing, and this bizarre belief that self-examination and honest critique is needed sometimes to correct our shortcomings. Otherwise, we would be going along assuming everything is fine, just like the Bush Administration, until things go boom boom and it all collapses.

I am looking forward to seeing your Real World site, and relating more to people such as yourself who I think know what I am talking about. Your friend, Robert

Sunday, January 18, 2009 10:59 AM

Hi Robert,

I get concerned too when I see a video advertisement of a young girl performing a sexual come-on for everyone to see and react to. She opens herself up to every sort of sexual advance, which can result in serious consequences to her. I suspect communicating without having to look into another persons eyes, as the Internet affords, emboldens us to open up with others in ways we haven’t felt comfortable with before. Any force as powerful and consequential as our sex drive needs to be confronted and openly discussed, not pushed underground to build up energy and pop out as it may. Sexual play is fun but, like everything else we do or are capable of doing, we need to manage its expression, not let it manage us, except under conditions of our own choosing. Otherwise our lives and relationships can suffer serious disruption.

Most of us are afraid to discuss sex openly because of the arousal factor and where it might take us. It’s such a powerful energy, we want to discuss it about as much as we want to hold a hot potato in our hand. In spite of how much it scares us, we need to discuss sex openly with our children and one another. It’s a part of who we are and nothing to be ashamed of. Our silence on the matter only adds to the belief that sex is something to be ashamed of. There are many practical reasons to manage the expression of our sexual energy and, somehow, we need to engage our kids in this discussion, without guilt or fear.

I remember as a young boy dreaming/wishing for adults in the world who were totally uninhibited and natural about sex. These imaginary teachers not only talked to me about sex but demonstrated it for me. They also shared the role sex plays in our lives. They told me it’s primary function is for reproduction and the continued existence of man. But beyond that, it is meant as a way to bond with one another, to celebrate and remind ourselves of our oneness through the giving and sharing of mutual pleasure.

Our sexuality will be one of the discussion topics on Real Talk World once it’s finished. It’s time to embrace ALL that we are, including the idea that we are basically good, not bad. Only by embracing the things we’re afraid of can we move through them and gain control over them. It’s the only way to inject common sense and wisdom into what we think and how we act.

In the absence of openness, honesty and wisdom, what’s left for us to do but experiment and learn on our own?

Live in Love, Truth, and Joy!

Pete

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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“As long as you believe that you dwell in a universe that is a threat, you must defend yourself against it. As long as you believe that the self is flawed and that the race is doomed and evil, you must defend yourself against yourself. And how can you then trust the voice of the psyche? When I say to you, ‘be spontaneous’, how dare you take that step? To be spontaneous would obviously give rise to all the lust, passion, murder, and hatred that to you is inherent in the human heart.”

“You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see. Quite literally you see what you want to see; and you see your own thoughts and emotional attitudes materialized in physical form. If changes are to occur, they must be mental and psychic changes. These will be reflected in your environment. Negative, distrustful, fearful, or degrading attitudes toward anyone work against the self.” – Seth

The third personality of Christ will indeed be known as a great psychic, for it is he who will teach humanity to use those inner senses that alone make true spirituality possible. Slayers and victims will change roles as reincarnational memories rise to the surface of consciousness. Through the development of these abilities, the sacredness of life will be intimately recognized and appreciated.

Now there will be several born before that time who in various ways will re-arouse man’s expectations. One such man has already been born in India, in a small province near Calcutta, but his ministry will seem to remain comparatively local for his lifetime.

Another will be born in Africa, a black man whose main work will be done in Indonesia. The expectations were set long ago in your terms, and will be fed by new prophets until the third personality of Christ does indeed emerge.

He will lead man behind the symbolism upon which religion has relied for so many centuries. He will emphasize individual spiritual experience, the expansiveness of soul, and teach man to recognize the multitudinous aspects of his own reality.

– Seth Speaks, pg. 328-329

After reading Seth’s comments on the Christ personality in Seth Speaks, some people are wondering if Barack Obama, born in Honolulu, Hawaii, August 4, 1961 (some argue he was actually born in Kenya), represents the black prophet born in Africa (birth father from Kenya) whose main work (personal growth?) was accomplished in Indonesia. Barack lived in and attended schools in Indonesia for four years from the age of six to ten after his mother, Ann Dunham, married a foreign student from Indonesia who was attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Shortly after the marriage, the family moved to Indonesia after General Suharto rose to power (1967) and recalled all students studying abroad.

It’s not a perfect match but it’s close, considering the influence of random events on the outcome of any prediction. – Pete

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Visit The LifeSong Store often. It’s where the world comes to shop for inspirational and life-changing ideas on T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, hoodies and more. Change the world for the better with POTS! (Philosophy On T–Shirts)